Consumers are increasingly aware of sustainability issues, putting pressure on manufacturers to deliver products that have a lesser impact on the environment. Sustainability issues at the forefront of consumer awareness include, but are not limited to, carbon emissions, recycling, energy consumption, and water use. Sustainability is also an increasing concern for service providers, as demand for services increase alongside rising energy costs, regulatory requirements, and social concerns over greenhouse gas emissions. In order to reduce the environmental impact, service providers have to understand what is being consumed to provide their services, and in turn, what impact this consumption has on the environment. Currently, there are no solutions for analyzing the environmental impact of a service.
Recently, computer software tools have been developed for studying sustainability efforts at the infrastructure-level. These computer tools are designed around compliance, assessment, energy metering for infrastructure (e.g., appliances and buildings). However, these efforts focus on a single aspect of the environmental impact (e.g., electricity usage).
Manual calculation with limited automation is still employed to determine partial costs for a business outcome. But these approaches rely on human intuition to adjust resource consumption to improve sustainability efforts. Accordingly, these approaches suffer from the high cost of human engagement, and are error-prone. In addition, there is little sharing of solutions between vendors, resulting in a lack of a comprehensive knowledge base for the many potential factors that affect sustainability decisions. This also makes it difficult to account for resources implemented on cross-data platforms, for example, those being provided by the so-called “cloud” computing environment.